Doctor Sleep (The Shining #2)(139)

Dan wasn’t hungry, but he needed the fuel. He did as she said.

11

She sat across from him, sipping a glass of juice from the last carafe Concetta Reynolds would ever have delivered from Dean & DeLuca. “Older man with booze issues, starstruck younger woman. That’s the picture I’m getting.”

“It’s the one I got, too.” Dan shoveled the eggs in steadily and methodically, not tasting them.

“Coffee, Mr. . . . Dan?”

“Please.”

She went past the spilled sugar to the Bunn. “He’s married, but his job takes him to a lot of faculty parties where there are a lot of pretty young gals. Not to mention a fair amount of blooming libido when the hour gets late and the music gets loud.”

“Sounds about right,” Dan said. “Maybe my mom used to go along to those parties, but then there was a kid to take care of at home and no money for babysitters.” She passed him a cup of coffee. He sipped it black before she could ask what he took in it. “Thanks. Anyway, they had a thing. Probably at one of the local motels. It sure wasn’t in the back of his car—we had a VW Bug. Even a couple of horny acrobats couldn’t have managed that.”

“Blackout screwing,” John said, coming into the room. His hair was standing up in sleep-quills at the back of his head. “That’s what the oldtimers call it. Are there any more of those eggs?”

“Plenty,” Lucy said. “Abra left a message on the counter.”

“Really?” John went to look at it. “That was her?”

“Yes. I’d know her printing anywhere.”

“Holy shit, this could put Verizon out of business.”

She didn’t smile. “Sit down and eat, John. You’ve got ten minutes, then I’m going to wake up Sleeping Beauty in there on the couch.” She sat down. “Go on, Dan.”

“I don’t know if she thought my dad would leave my mom for her or not, and I doubt if you’ll find the answer to that one in her trunk. Unless maybe she left a diary. All I know—based on what Dave said and what Concetta told me later—is that she hung around for awhile. Maybe hoping, maybe just partying, maybe both. But by the time she found out she was pregnant, she must have given up. For all I know, we might have been in Colorado by then.”

“Do you suppose your mother ever found out?”

“I don’t know, but she must have wondered how faithful he was, especially on the nights when he came in late and shitfaced. I’m sure she knew that drunks don’t limit their bad behavior to betting the ponies or tucking five-spots into the cle**ages of the waitresses down at the Twist and Shout.”

She put a hand on his arm. “Are you all right? You look exhausted.”

“I’m okay. But you’re not the only one who’s trying to process all this.”

“She died in a car accident,” Lucy said. She had turned from Dan and was looking fixedly at the bulletin board on the fridge. In the middle was a photograph of Concetta and Abra, who looked about four, walking hand in hand through a field of daisies. “The man with her was a lot older. And drunk. They were going fast. Momo didn’t want to tell me, but around the time I turned eighteen, I got curious and nagged her into giving me at least some of the details. When I asked if my mother was drunk, too, Chetta said she didn’t know. She said the police have no reason to test passengers who are killed in fatal accidents, only the driver.” She sighed. “It doesn’t matter. We’ll leave the family stories for another day. Tell me what’s happened to my daughter.”

He did. At some point, he turned around and saw Dave Stone standing in the doorway, tucking his shirt into his pants and watching him.

12

Dan started with how Abra had gotten in touch with him, first using Tony as a kind of intermediary. Then how Abra had come in contact with the True Knot: a nightmare vision of the one she called “the baseball boy.”

“I remember that nightmare,” Lucy said. “She woke me up, screaming. It had happened before, but it was the first time in two or three years.”

Dave frowned. “I don’t remember that at all.”

“You were in Boston, at a conference.” She turned to Dan. “Let me see if I’ve got this. These people aren’t people, they’re . . . what? Some kind of vampires?”

“In a way, I suppose. They don’t sleep in coffins during the day or turn into bats by moonlight, and I doubt if crosses and garlic bother them, but they’re parasites, and they’re certainly not human.”

“Human beings don’t disappear when they die,” John said flatly.

“You really saw that happen?”

“We did. All three of us.”

“In any case,” Dan said, “the True Knot isn’t interested in ordinary children, only those who have the shining.”

“Children like Abra,” Lucy said.

“Yes. They torture them before killing them—to purify the steam, Abra says. I keep picturing moonshiners making white lightning.”

“They want to . . . inhale her,” Lucy said. Still trying to get it straight in her head. “Because she has the shining.”

“Not just the shining, but a great shining. I’m a flashlight. She’s a lighthouse. And she knows about them. She knows what they are.”